Monday, 23 February 2009

I've been dying to upgrade my MythTV
setup to use Lenny
for ages, ever since I got a HD HomeRun and
discovered my primary MythTV front end couldn't play back the HD recordings
for some reason (I just got a blue box and the audio, and a lot of errors in
the X server log).

I figured it was either the kernel or X, and I hadn't been able to get
the lirc kernel module to build against anything newer than Etch's
2.6.18 kernel (as I discovered today, that was because of some contamination
in module-assistant's build directory, so I could have tried a newer kernel
ages ago - drat), so I was unable to determine if it was the kernel or X.org
itself.

An added bonus of upgrading X was it talks to the TV better. I've got the PC
hooked up to the TV's VGA input, and previously, the best I could do was get
it to talk 1024x768, with the TV set to a 4:3 aspect ratio. When I initially
upgraded, for whatever reason, the TV was very unhappy with what it was
receiving on the VGA input and wouldn't display anything, so in desperation,
I tried ditching the xorg.conf entirely, and then everything just
worked. X came up with a 1280x768 resolution, I think despite the TV
thinking it's getting 1024x768, so now we can have the TV in 16:9 mode, and
things don't look all stretched, even when the playback is only 4:3.

And HD, oh it looks glorious. We just watched the Oscars, and it completely
filled the TV and looked absolutely fantastic. Playing back HD content seems
to really peg the CPU though. The playback was unbearably choppy until we
paused the commercial flagging job that was madly trying to flag commercials
in the same recording we were currently watching (i.e. the Oscars).

The only thing that seems to be acting a bit weird is notification pop ups
from the D-Bus notification
daemon. I've got a Griffin
PowerMate that runs a home-grown script to re-pair the Bluetooth
keyboard and mouse, and that uses the D-Bus notification system to provide
feedback while it's running. It seems that while the MythTV front end is
running, those pop ups aren't displaying correctly. I haven't gotten to the
bottom that one yet.

I also had some problems with a couple of init scripts and splashy
causing bootup to hang, but I'm not sure that's completely reproducible (I
don't reboot this machine all that often) so it may have been operator
error.

Overall, very happy with the outcome. The upgrade was fairly smooth, and
I've got the additional functionality I've been waiting for.

Wednesday, 04 February 2009

I just learned about PlayOn, which allows you to
watch Netflix and Hulu content on various game consoles, with support for
the Wii coming in early 2009.

This all sounded good, but it seems that it relies on a Windows PC to stream
the crap to the game console, it doesn't allow the game console to do it all
itself. As I don't have a Windows PC in the house (at least not one that's
always running Windows, Sarah can reboot her Mac into Windows if the need
arises) this is of little use to me. No sale.